Jianghe Ouyang

A key glints in the Sunday morning light.

A returning traveler is locked out in the dark.

A knock on the door is always more faint than

the rasp of metal in the keyhole.

Only a dreamed address is reliable.

As I bike down a quiet street

all the headlights go out at once.

In the night sky above, a hand clenches a brake.

I hear a clink. A key has fallen to the ground.

I see a ring of keys, keys of years past

glinting in the light. I pick them up.

But where are the hands that hide behind them?

A row of closed days, ending in Saturday—

but I do not know which to unlock.

Now it is Sunday. All the doors on the street

stand open. I toss the keys away.

No need to knock. Just walk right in.

Such a crowded world, and no one at home.

Where the immemorial and the instant meet, opening and distance appear.

Through the opening: a door, crack of light.

Behind the door, a kitchen.

Where the knife rises and falls, clouds gather, disperse.

A lightspeed joining of life and death, cut

in two: halves of a sun, of slowness.

Halves of a turnip.

A mother in the kitchen, a lifetime of cuts.

A cabbage cut into mountains and rivers,

a fish, cut along its leaping curves,

laid on the table

still yearning for the pond.

Summer’s tofu

cut into premonitions of snow.

A potato listens to the onion-counterpoint

of the knife, dropping petals at its strokes:

self and thing, halves of nothing

at the center of time.

Where gone and here meet, the knife rises, falls.

But this mother is not holding a knife.

What she has been given is not a knife

but a few fallen leaves.

The fish leaps over the blade from the sea

to the stars. The table is in the sky now,

the market has been crammed into the refrigerator,

and she cannot open cold time.

Over the course of the next two weeks Picasso will paint a bull.

A bull whose body seems possessed by a strange reality:

the more Picasso paints, the less there is.

“Can less”—the artist asks—“become more?”

“Right on,” Picasso replies.

The critic waits to see the painter’s more.

But Picasso’s bull just keeps getting less and less.

The hooves are first to go—then the horns,

then the skin itself drops off like a retina,

revealing the joints between empty spaces.

“How less does it have to get before it becomes more?”

“That depends on the name you give to more.”

The critic is confused. “Would you say that in this work

you are committing moral violence on the bovine body,

shearing off every scrap of flesh with your Mediterranean wind?”

“Don’t blame the wind—look at that butcher shop

across the way. Every day I watch lovely young ladies

walk home with a few dozen pounds of his meat.”

“Whose meat? The meat of the bull on your canvas?”

“Now that depends on which knife you use.”

“Is this a contest between the ethics of aesthetics and the ethics of life?”

“All cut up, how’d he have energy for that?”

“And what’s left over? Anything?”

“No, no spirit remains. Praise waste.”

“Is your bull an act of subtraction upon the world?”

“Why not addition? I imagine that butcher is

counting his cash right now.” Sure enough, the next day,

the butcher’s wife comes with her life savings to buy Picasso’s bull.

But all she sees is a couple lines.

“Where’s the bull?” she asks, indignant.

I live between the bricks of Chinese characters,

in glances exchanged between image and image.

They’re separate but continuous, with shifting limbs

and a rhythm uniform as gunfire.

The dust settles: Chinese is simplified.

Off tumble legs, arms, eyes.

But my language still runs, still reaches, sees.

These mysteries give birth to hunger.

And there are plenty of suns and moons left

to linger over with my comrades-in-tongue.

In this vast crystal aggregate of accents and dialects,

this murky admixture of ancient and new,

my mouth is a circular ruin,

teeth plunging into space,

never hitting bone.

Such vistas, such meat: Chinese is a banquet for all.

I eat up my suns and moons, and the ancients’ too, till

one evening I walk through the English corner, and see

a bunch of Chinese mobbing an American kid: it seems

they want to make their homes in English.

But in China, English has no sovereign turf.

It’s a class, a test, a TV show,

a way of speaking, words on paper.

On paper, we behold our penciled nature.

A sketch, a life of worn erasers.

After centuries of inkwells, spectacles, typewriters,

after years of accumulated lead,

how could English be so light, folded and tucked in our corner?

Now we speak diplospeak, acronyms,

muffins, aspirin, forks and knives.

But these changes do not affect the nose, the skin:

like the toothbrush you pick up in the morning, English

glides lightly over the teeth, whitening language.

With so much ink caked in my gums, I’d better

brush every day: this requires water, a cleaning agent, and perspective.

It gives rise to theories of taste, and countless

disparities in everyday usage.

It also requires a hand, reaching into English,

two fingers apart, a letter, a triumph,

a Nazi experiment upon the self.

A cigarette falls to the ground still burning

like history, which after all

is what happens when one nation eats another’s words.

One step forward, you’ve got the Third Reich, Hitler.

I don’t know if that madman gunned down English,

massacred Shakespeare and Keats.

But I do know that English comes in two flavors:

the noble, alphabetized English of Oxford,

and the English of Churchill and Roosevelt, armed to the teeth.

Its metaphors, its science, its obliterating aesthetics

landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I watched Chinese characters become Japanese corpses—

but outside of language, our nations are allies.

I’ve read this history, and I’m suspicious.

I don’t know which is crazier, history or me.

What’s happened, this past hundred years, between Chinese and English?

Why are so many Chinese streaming into English,

trying hard as they can to blanche their own skin?

Why do they treat their language like an estranged wife,

a home in a broken mirror?

I live alone amid my stacked bricks, conversing

with paper dolls, dreaming in English, while all around me

Chinese mount the steps to English, turning

from people of pictures to people of sound.

1

The thing between seeing and seeing is glass.

The separation not seen

between face and face.

But glass, as a thing, is not transparent.

A glass factory is a massive eyeball,

labor at its center, whose darkness is daylight

glinting at the cores of things.

A thing persists in its initial tear.

As a bird in pure light persists in its shadow.

Gathers light into darkness, offers it back.

Where glass is everywhere, glass is not itself

but spirit.

As air seems not to exist, where all is air.

2

The glass factory is not far from the sea.

To know water is to know glass.

Cold, solid, fragile: this is the price

at which a thing attains transparence.

Transparence, strange language of seeing waves:

by speaking it I have already left it.

Left behind wineglasses, pictures in frames, the changing-room mirror, all these

specific, mass-produced things.

But I live in things, enveloped by things, a life brimming with want.

Language is overflow, evaporation.

And finally, transparence.

Language is flying: void to void, lightning to lightning. So much sky

outside the body of a flying bird,

and its shadow: a nick of light on the surface of the sea.

A thing cannot leave a mark on glass unless

it is lighter than shadow, deeper than a cut, sheerer than a blade.

A crack cannot be seen.

3

I come, I see, I speak.

Language is clouded with time,

the glimmer sinks with the sediment,

a haze of blindness disperses from the center.

This is the process that occurs within glass.

Flame’s heart, flame’s breath.

In flame, water experiences a change of perspective.

Two spirits meet, two obliterations become one

eternity.

Water passes through flame and is glass:

a subzero burning, like reason or feeling,

shallow, lucid, rejecting flow.

In fruit, in the depths of the sea, water never flows.

4

So, this the glass is I see—

still stone, but never strong again,

still flame, but never hot again,

still water, but never gentle, never flowing.

A wound that does not bleed.

A sound that does not pass through silence.

Glass is the thing between loss and loss,

permitting light

like language and time

at a towering price.

5

In one factory I see three kinds of glass.

Substance, ornament, symbol.

They tell me glass is the child of muddled stone.

In the void that is stone, death is not ending

but original, mutable fact.

Stone crumbles, glass is born.

This is real.

But there is another reality that lifts me from this height

to another height, where glass is nothing

but water, a fluid made boned and unflowable,

where flame is a bonechilling cold,

where for a thing to be beautiful it must also be fragile.

All lofty things of this earth

and their tears.